OK, as I talk to yet another friend who is having trouble with their computer not working, it occurs to me far too few people back up their work. If that is you, please please keep reading.

Firstly, a lot of people simply don’t bother backing up because they don’t think about it or don’t care. I normally find the idea of loosing every photo from the last 5 years makes most people quite upset, as does the thought of the hours of work spend on essays and alike going down the drain. Backing up is painfully cheap, very easy to set up, costs very little and makes life so much better when things do go pointy bits up.

If you are anything like me you have whole swaths of your life stored on the computer, shouldn’t you be more careful with it? Laptops in particular are very prone to disk failure. They are after all laptops, they take a lot of knocks, bumps and generally get a fairly rough life. They are also what almost all students trust their lives with. By their very design they only have one disk built in, it is your single point of failure, it goes and your data goes with it.

There are several ways to do backups, some ways are very simple, other not so much, some cost a fair bit, some are dirt cheap and some require lots of effort, some require none at all.

DVD’s

The most basic form of backup that I can think of is just to back your work up on DVD. Most computers from the last couple of years and beyond come as standard with the ability to write DVD’s. Every major OS in current use can write to them with no special software and they cost almost nothing. At first glance I can find a pack of 25 disks for £4.99. Those disks have 4.7GB of storage on them. To put that another way, that’s 1340 photos from my fairly expensive camera which produces HUGE files. Most current cameras I see don’t make images bigger than tow thirds that. So that’s around 2000 images per disk. So in other words, with a pack of 25 disks you could keep the most important data to you backed-up for a year or so.

External hard disks

DVD’s do have their downsides, they require you to do some work, they require you to update them from time to time and they also take a bit of time to get your data back off if you do kill your machine.

With any form of harddrive (in this case an external one) you can set it up to copy your data over as things change or as I prefer to do, get it to wait a couple of days just in case I want to go to the backup and get an older version of the file. You can pick up an external harddrive for scary money. I have just found 1TB (1024GB) for under £100. Even I would struggle to fill that, so the cheaper options will almost certainly be for you.

As for software to set backing up, I suggest something called Syncback. This has a free version linked to on their downloads page. It is pretty simple to set up, it has an easy mode and holds your hand through setting backups up. You just pick your my documents folder as the source and then your external harddrive as the location to backup to.

Internal disk

If you have a desktop you can take this a step further by adding an internal disk, they are even cheaper and even more reliable, especially as they don’t have to take much in the way of knocks and bumps.

If half this article was too complicated for you, then just copy some stuff to DVD’s and lump it into your bottom draw, its better than nothing. But please please make some form of backup, recovering data from a broken disk can cost thousands of pounds and take months to get back with limited success. If you also don’t think this will ever happen to you, know that i have 2 disks in my computer and 2 outside of it dedicated to backup and I have fixed a awful lot of machines and got back a lot of peoples data, but it isn’t always possible and I’m not made of spare time.